The Victoria and Albert’s new look at “Europe 1600–1815”

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

By Joan DeJean   Neptune and Triton  by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 1622– 1623, as installed in the newly reopened Europe 1600–1815 galleries at the V&A. Except as noted, all images © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.       In December 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum’s European galleries were opened to the public for the first time in nearly …

September/October 2025

Subscribe to The Magazine ANTIQUES today! And sign-up for our newsletter! SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2025 Guest Editor’s Letter Pieter Estersohn In ConversationLessons from the disaster and subsequent restoration at Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison, New York. ObjectsThe Birth of the Travel Memento: The Grand Tour began as a way for young men of means to see Europe, and resulted in the invention …

Behind Closed Drawers

Wendy Moonan Furniture & Decorative Arts

At the Kravet archive in Woodbury, Long Island, tens of thousands of textile samples from around the world are assiduously catalogued and preserved, serving both as a comprehensive record of sewn, woven, embroidered, and printed design history, and as inspiration for contemporary makers.

Exhibitions: Immortal Thread

Katherine Lanza LoPalo Art, Exhibitions

The venerable tradition of French tapestry weaving, which has provided adornments for palace walls since medieval times, is brought to contemporary life in a new exhibition at the Clark Art Institute.

Hispania Dreaming

Jeanne Sloane Furniture & Decorative Arts

A bespoke showcase for the extensive antiques collection of its builder, Casa del Herrero, near Santa Barbara, remains the finest exemplar of the Californian fashion for all things Spanish during the first decades of the twentieth century.

Mistress of Her Domain

Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts, In the Galleries

Emerging during the late Middle Ages, the domestic space known as the estrado kept pace with the ever-increasing reach and buying power of well-to-do households in Spain and the Spanish Americas, becoming a showcase for fineries from the world over. But as a female-coded area, it provided women a degree of autonomy and self-expression not generally possible in Continental or colonial society of the time.

Objects: Eggs for Kings

Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle Art

Treasured and embellished ostrich eggs litter what is one of the strangest side paths of decorative arts history—as well as one of the oldest…